The Substance

Desperate to secure her fading celebrity status, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a Hollywood actress-cum-TV exercise impresario, undergoes a black-market medical procedure that promises self-actualization, but culminates in the spawning of Sue (Margaret Qualley), a bold and brash clone of her younger self that perpetuates its existence via weekly spinal taps. The pair are warned to respect their new symbiotic relationship or risk corrosive consequences. But as Sue starts reserving more time in the limelight at the behest of a slimeball executive (Dennis Quaid) and her own growing ambition, Sparkle is soon faced with an existential threat, one that engenders a wicked feud with her tulpa and a knock-down, drag-out battle to reclaim her autonomy.

Taken at its premise, The Substance appears to be merely a well-trodden exercise in satirizing Hollywood’s contribution to patriarchal beauty standards. But just as her breakout Midnight Madness debut Revenge (TIFF ’17) uniquely reframed its horror sub-genre, Coralie Fargeat once more transforms a familiar feminine allegory by injecting an audacious tone of carnivalesque camp that ratchets its ingredients to perversely mythic heights. Seemingly intermingling bits of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor, and Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, Fargeat’s stylish execution and deliriously breakneck momentum further cements an identity all her own. The result is an unforgettably twisted parable that features exceptionally embodied performances from Moore and Qualley, and outrageous body-horror on the order of FX legends like Screaming Mad George.

PETER KUPLOWSKY

Content advisory: strobing/strobing effects; themes of self-harm; explicit violence, horror, crude content